ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a neglected aspect of the secularization of higher education: how institutions made sense of their changed identity. It draws on the insights of memory studies to examine how Mount Holyoke College reconstructed the image of its nineteenth-century founder Mary Lyon during the process of moving away from her evangelical vision for the school. The chapter argues that women's college maintained continuity with her founding vision by shifting the focus from her distinctly evangelical commitments to her commitments perceived to be distinctly feminine in the early twentieth-century context. It examines the means by which one such school—Mount Holyoke College—reworked its identity by altering how the school portrayed its founder Mary Lyon in its anniversary celebrations and in her proliferating biographies. During the period of religious liberalization in American higher education, Mount Holyoke changed from female seminary to women's college, a process which caused it to grapple even more than other women's colleges with the nature of collegiate education.
